Energy management of the aircraft during the approach is a topic of great concern in the aviation industry. As used herein, the term “energy management” relates, at least in part, to the kinetic energy of the aircraft (forward motion through space) and the potential energy of the aircraft (in reference to its height above the ground). Proper execution of energy management can significantly reduce landing related accidents and incidents and thus improve overall safety statistics for the aviation industry.
The person skilled in this art is currently aware of several systems in the prior art that can support a pilot with energy management. However this is a complex task affected by multiple parameters, e.g. speed, altitude, configuration, distance from the threshold, lateral and vertical route constraints, etc. Various algorithms and commercial implementations have been published in the art, which can provide various styles of “outputs” for energy management support. One example is the commonly-assigned U.S. patent application publication no. 2013/0218374 A1, the contents of which are incorporated by reference herein in their entirety. In addition, it is important to properly communicate the output of such algorithm to end user, i.e., the flight crew/pilot.
In the current art, a particular challenge is to depict (graphically) complex output data in a simple and compact way so that the pilot can quickly evaluate aircraft energy with respect to current situation in flight (remaining distance to go, altitude, current aircraft configuration, ATC constraints, etc.) as well as understand its future evolution. Moreover, energy depiction should allow pilots to easily understand the options of action, and do so even while performing other demanding tasks during descend and approach. Accordingly, it should be understood that the closest prior art to this patent application are those systems that communicate energy management to the flight crew, but do so in a way that is sub-optimal. The goal of the present patent application is to overcome the technical challenges of presenting this information to the flight crew in a manner that is easy to interpret and understand such that the pilot can quickly evaluate aircraft energy with respect to current situation in flight as well as understand its future evolution. Our technical solution to this problem considers the following parameters, with reference to the pilot's understanding of the aircraft's current energy situation:                a) current energy situation of the aircraft by means of selected parameter (speed or distance to go);        b) what should be the optimum energy situation at this moment;        c) how far the aircraft is from a critical situation—in this case from unstabilized approach;        d) whether there are actions compliant with SOPs that would assure a stabilized approach at the final gate:                    1) if so, what actions are applicable at the moment;            2) if not, what is the additional distance to go which would be sufficient to re-stabilize the approach;                        e) if the approach is unstabilized when getting closer to the ground, what are the reasons for being unstabilized;        
As such, while the closest prior art discloses algorithms that generate energy management information, so far, the display of such information to the flight crew in an effective and easy to understand manner has proven elusive. Thus, it is an object of the present disclosure to provide flight displays and methods for generating flight displays pertaining to energy management that constitute an improvement over the prior art in their presentation of such information to the flight crew. Our disclosure thus focuses on systems for displaying energy management information that have never before been seen or suggested in the prior art. Other desirable features and characteristics of the present invention will become apparent from the subsequent detailed description of the invention and the appended claims, taken in conjunction with the accompanying drawings and this background of the invention.